Introduction
This blog post includes some information and visuals from my final project exploring areas managed by the National Park Service. Most of my interest in this project is regarding areas with the title “National Park”, but it also includes some information about other recreational areas the National Park Service manages. These areas includes historic parks, military parks, monuments, trails, and a few other classifications. My visualizations include a map, data tables, and two visitors plots.
Visualizations
For the map I started by using the shape file provided by the National Park Service to plot all of these areas and give a small popup to inform the user of what they are. However, using that large of a file (over 400 areas) was too big to be exported so I created a map with just the areas with the the title of national park. For a share able version of the map I scraped a Wikipedia page about national parks to gain some more information about this group of 62 areas, like their size, visitor count in 2022, date of establishment, and a brief description of the park. I then had to clean the names of all the areas listed in the large shape file to get rid of any extra text so I could join the new information with the file by the name of the national parks. By doing this I could create a map of just true national parks that has more information about each area in its popup window.